"Transitions" as an archaeological concept. Interpreting the final Ubaid - Late Chalcolithic transition in the northern periphery of Mesopotamia.

The paper deals with the problem of defining and recognising the real transitions between two ‘periods’ (chronological entities we identify on the basis of homogeneous assemblages of materials), before addressing a specific analysis of the Final Ubaid-Late Chalcolithic transition. In the first part the author discusses the problem from a theoretical and methodological point of view, revisiting the use of the term and concept of ‘transition’, its meaning and ambiguities and the difficulties implicit in the analytical procedure of dividing the unfolding of history into “phases” and “periods”. She stresses that our needs for classification and ordering sometimes bring to compose gradual and progressive changes between two periods into a new phase, made of those elements that are not evident parts of either one period or another. The paper also try to stress the distinction between real transitions, which do exist and are the result of the process of change from one well defined and coherent universe (a period) to another, and those obscure and nuanced periods in the archaeological record which are simply the reflection of the lack of information. In the second part of the paper, the author tries to apply the previous discussion to the case of the Late Chalcolithic 1 and 2 in Upper Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia and to the problem of the so-called transition from the Ubaid period.